A new Twitter feature to make life easier for emergency managers!

Getting accurate location information is one of the main challenges when using social media in emergencies. Knowing that a bridge has collapsed or that a family is sitting on a roof is useless if you don’t know where this is happening.

Unfortunately, getting precise information from people is very difficult in an emergency: some people have problems with the technology, some don’t know the location very well, some are too stressed to give coherent information and in some parts of the world there aren’t many street names.

As a result, all social media listening projects during emergencies use considerable resources to ask “Can you please describe your location more precisely?” A new Twitter feature, which is currently in private beta, has the potential to make life much easier for emergency managers.

Through Twitter’s Direct Messaging APIs, it is now possible to initiate direct messages and to use these DMs to request location information from the user’s phone, i.e. the GPS module. Of course, the user has to give explicit consent for his/her location to be shared.

On their blog, Twitter demonstrates the functionality with the following example from TGI Fridays:

In an emergency management context I immediately see two uses for this:

Help users share their precise location from mobile devices, with just one click. As an added benefit, this method also addresses some privacy concerns, since the location is shared by DM only and not publicly.

Tell users where they can get help, for example where the next shelter is.

As the example from TGIF shows, location sharing can be linked with chat bots. That means you could write a simple bot that asks users what their needs are (food, shelter, etc) and then send them to the right address for that specific need. In an ideal world, you could even connect this with information about which shelters still have spaces and which are full and route people accordingly.

According to Twitter, these features will not be available to “normal” users, but only to businesses, i.e. there will be a price tag attached to them.

Source: Social Media for Good

What are your thoughts on these features? Please leave a comment below!